All posts tagged ‘Identity Crisis’

The Movement, a new comic with a political viewpoint coming from DC Comics

This week’s adventures climbing the cliffs of insanity include my thoughts on the nature of heroes, especially super ones, the announcement of a couple of very political comics from DC, and a glimpse inside Dreamworks Animation, which gave me a Best Job Ever moment.

My musings on superheroes was triggered by DC’s announcement of two new series: The Movement and The Green Team. They’re bookend titles, with one focusing on the one percent of the people with the money and the other, on the 99 percent of the people toiling for it. The titles intrigue me, not only because they’re openly political, or because the talent involved is considerable, but because it promises new characters that perhaps can be used in this kind of environment without it seeming forced.

But it also sent me thinking about the nature of superheroes in general.

I grew up reading superheroes where the most important element of that name was “hero” rather than “super.”

But, lately, a number of the books from the big two superhero publishers, DC and Marvel, seem to have forgotten the hero part of the name. Marvel has always had more flawed, more human superheroes but, as a whole, these people have still been heroes. The most perfect example is Peter Parker, Spider-Man, who has all sorts of problems. He can’t pay the rent sometimes, he has romantic trouble, he wonders if his life as a hero is at all worth it.

But, at the end, he’s a hero. He’ll fight for those who can’t fight for themselves and he will never quite cross that line into villainy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in last year’s Avengers Vs. X-Men event from Marvel. Spider-Man comes through as a true hero. (His fellow “heroes” do not but I’ll get to that later.)

The trend of viewing superheroes as only people with powers is often blamed/attributed to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen, which loosely based its protagonists on the Charlton comic superheroes and explored what would really happen in our world if people possessed these kind of world-changing powers. It’s not pretty because, of course, people aren’t pretty. It’s an anti-hero story.

I think this is one of the reasons the movie flopped at the box office. Movie goers who were expecting a super “hero” tale received the exact opposite.